Carbohydrates
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Sugars Across the Body
If you've been following along with my work for any length of time, you know I'm not big on chasing symptoms or treating diseases by name. We clean and nourish the system that's affected, then let the body do its job.
The carbohydrate number is one of those numbers that touches every system you've got brain, liver, pancreas, heart, skin, digestion, even your mood and how well you sleep at night.
This post walks through what your sugar number actually means across your whole body, how to test it accurately at home using your refractometer and conductivity meter together (not just one or the other), and exactly what to do when it's sitting too high or too low or stuck somewhere in between that miserable middle zone where everything feels unstable at once.
This blog is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prescribe for any condition. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice.
I want to be clear that we're working in a different realm here. We're looking at a number that nobody else measures, and we're seeing how that specific number affects the whole body in distinct ways. Some of the terms I use may sound like the major terms doctors use, but they are not.
Remember, we are not measuring blood sugar here. We're not even measuring the normal sugars that doctors look for in urine. We're measuring total dissolved solids, which includes sugar metabolites. Your body turns sugar into metabolites to move it out when it can't be burned, used, or stored properly. This affects the way your body uses its fuel, and it affects the ratio of oxygen throughout the system. So when we talk about sugar here, we are not talking about what the medical industry measures.
The Quick Version
When your sugar number is off, here's what's happening in your body in plain language:
- Your sugar oxygen balance is off. Sugar and oxygen ride together in your blood. When sugar leaves that 1.5 sweet spot whether it crashes low or climbs high your blood can't carry oxygen the way it should. Every cell in your body pays the price, but your brain and liver pay first because they burn the most fuel.
- Your brain is the master Director of your whole body and anytime the sugars are out of range. The brain cannot optimally direct the body to operate properly. The brain is the most sensitive to this sugar shift more than anything else. The brain tells the body what to do which actually largely means it tells the liver what to do because 70% of everything you are is created in the liver before it's sent out to any other area of the body to finish the other 30% and get all the credit.
- Your body temperature drifts. Your pancreas makes a natural warming alcohol that keeps your core temperature steady enough for digestive enzymes to work right. Drop below 1.5 on Brix and you don't make enough of it; climb above 5.49 and you make too much of it. Either way, digestion breaks before symptoms show up.
- Your insulin either starves or floods. Low sugar drives excess insulin that strips Vitamin C out of position as the chelate holding your cell walls together. High sugar drives insufficient insulin that lets alcohol accumulate and overheat tissue. Both directions damage collagen cement in blood vessels, gums, and connective tissue.
- Your energy swings wildly. The carbohydrate number has more effect on how you feel hour to hour than any other number on your test panel. When it's off, you feel it as fatigue, mood swings, brain fog, cravings, anxiety, insomnia at 2 AM, or that wired-but-tired feeling where nothing quite works right.
How to Test Your Sugar Number
Here's where most people go wrong with their sugar reading: they put urine on the refractometer, look through the eyepiece, write down whatever number they see, and call it done.
That number is wrong almost every time. The refractometer reads total dissolved solids in your urine. A big chunk of those dissolved solids are salts, not sugar. If your salt reading is high that day because you didn't drink enough water or you ate something salty yesterday your refractometer reading will look higher than your actual sugar level. So we always correct for it.
Step 1 Take your refractometer reading.
Open the front cap of your refractometer. Put three drops of urine on the blue lens. Close the cap gently so a thin film of liquid covers the screen. Hold the black eyepiece up to your eye with the blue lens pointed at a bright light source like a window or a lamp. Focus until you can clearly see where the bottom of the dark curtain registers on the scale.
Write that number down as your raw Brix reading.
Step 2 Take your conductivity reading.
Measure 1 mL of urine into a clean cup. Add 35 mL of distilled water to that cup and swirl to mix thoroughly. Put your conductivity meter into the dilution and wait about 30 seconds for it to settle (some meters wander a bit; thirty seconds is when you want to read). Read the top number on your meter and write it down.
You can also dip the meter directly in the urine, but this only works if the salts are low enough if your tool reads 19.99 when you dip it in the urine or it reads 19990 then it's the highest the tool can read and you need to dilute it instead
Step 3 Apply the salt correction formula.
The rule is simple: subtract 0.1 Brix from your refractometer reading for every 1C unit above 15C.
Worked example: refractometer reads 2.5 Brix and salt reads 36C.
36 minus 15 equals 21.
21 times 0.1 equals 2.1.
2.5 minus 2.1 equals 0.4 Brix corrected.
That corrected number is your real sugar reading for this test session.
Step 4 Calibrate before you trust any of it.
Corrected Sugar Number Calculator
Enter the raw Brix reading from the refractometer and the raw reading from the conductivity meter (from the diluted sample in Step 2 above). This converts the conductivity reading to a salts "C" number, then applies the salt correction to get the corrected Brix number and the zone it falls in.
The Corrected Reading Zones
Once you've applied the salt correction, your corrected number places you in one of these zones:
- Optimum 1.5 Body is generating enough energy with enough oxygen to run every system cleanly.
- healing range 1.2 to 2.0 Body can work and move in the right direction from here But it is not optimum unless it sits at exactly 1.5. And when symptoms start showing up in your daily life fatigue that won't quit, mood swings you can't explain, cravings that drive you crazy at 2 PM it's almost always because your corrected number has been sitting outside the healing range of 1.2 to 2 for a while. That's where compensation fails and symptoms break through.
- Misery zone 2.0 to 5.49 Looks high but tends to drop; oxygen is present but not distributed correctly.
- Rising range Above 5.49 Sugar toxicity; body is converting excess sugar into alcohol internally.
- Low Below 1.0 Symptoms break through; risk of passing out increases as you approach zero.
What Sugar Does Across Your Body
This is where it gets real. When your sugar number leaves that 1.5 sweet spot whether it crashes low or climbs high or ping-pongs through the misery zone in between it doesn't just affect one part of you. It touches every system you've got.
Here's how it shows up across the body:
Brain and Nervous System
Your brain burns more fuel per pound than any other organ in your body. When sugar drops below 1.0 Brix corrected your brain cells start starving for glucose within minutes.
- That's when you feel it as brain fog you can't shake.
- Dizziness when you stand up too fast.
- Mood swings that come out of nowhere.
- Anxiety or panic that hits without warning.
- Phobias that didn't used to bother you.
- Hallucinations in severe cases.
- Convulsions if it crashes hard enough.
The mechanism is straightforward: glucose carries oxygen into brain cells. No glucose means no oxygen delivery means brain cells start misfiring.
When sugar climbs above 5.49 corrected your brain gets a different problem: too much alcohol production internally from the excess sugar fermenting in your bloodstream. That alcohol acts like a sedative on your central nervous system which is why high-sugar people often seem "happy-go-lucky" even when their numbers are objectively worse than someone sitting low.
Both directions damage your thinking but they damage it differently.
Liver and Pancreas
Your health is only as good as your liver is.
- Your liver creates the first 70% of each of your digestive enzymes, proteins, hormones and any amino acid complex etc.... based on signals from your brain about what food is coming.
- Your pancreas makes a natural warming alcohol that keeps your core temperature steady enough for those enzymes to work right.
- When sugar is off both organs pay first because they burn the most fuel and they make the most enzymes.
- Drop below 1.0 Brix corrected and your pancreas can't make enough warming alcohol to keep core temperature up. Even a tenth of a degree drop in core temperature impairs digestive enzyme function. That impairment shows up as massive indigestion sometimes so severe people mistake it for a heart attack because the pressure against the diaphragm creates chest pain that feels cardiac.
- Climb above 5.49 Brix corrected and excess sugar ferments into alcohol internally. That alcohol forces calcium out of solution and precipitates it directly into liver tissue. Over time this drives cirrhosis patterns where healthy liver architecture gets replaced with fibrous scar tissue.
- The pancreas also takes a hit on both ends: low sugar starves it of fuel; high sugar overdrives its insulin production until it's exhausted.
Heart and Circulation
Your heart responds to sugar swings faster than almost any other muscle in your body.
- When Brix drops rapidly below 1.2 corrected your adrenal glands pump out emergency adrenaline to keep you from passing out. That adrenaline forces your heart to beat excessively hard or fast or both. You feel it as palpitations or a racing pulse during what should be normal activity.
- When Brix sits elevated above 5.49 corrected for extended periods excess internal alcohol thickens blood viscosity and forces red blood cells to stick together (agglutination). Those clumped cells can't glide through tiny capillaries smoothly which means oxygen delivery to tissues drops even though blood oxygen technically looks normal on standard tests.
- Both directions stress the heart but they stress it through different mechanisms which is why treating "heart problems" without checking what direction the sugar number has gone usually misses the actual cause.
Skin
Your skin is one of the first places you'll see sugar problems show up because it's visible every day.
- Dropping sugar pattern drives dry skin through two mechanisms: erratic insulin output strips protective lipids from skin cells causing rapid moisture loss; high salts pull fluid out of dermal layers via reverse osmosis leaving skin parched and tight especially after washing.
- Rising sugar pattern drives breakouts through fermentation: excess circulating sugars feed localized bacterial fermentation on skin surfaces which shows up as acne tendencies especially when combined with high pH shifts pushing toxicity outward toward skin as a secondary elimination pathway.
- Both extremes damage collagen cement holding skin cells together because Vitamin C utilization breaks down whenever insulin output is unstable either too much or too little.
- That breakdown shows up as easy bruising from minimal impact spider veins varicose tendencies bleeding gums slow wound healing and fragile capillaries that look like they're showing through more than they used to.
Digestion
This is where everything breaks first even before symptoms show up anywhere else in your body.
- Your digestive chain runs like this:
- Mouth sends signal to brain about what's coming.
- Brain signals liver to prepare enzymes.
- Liver creates the first 70% of each of those enzymes based on what was signaled.
- Liver ships 70% finished enzyme packages out to salivary glands, stomach, pancreas and intestines.
- Each gland reports back to brain what it received so brain can give final processing instructions for that specific food load.
The whole chain runs through one communication hub: your brain. And your brain runs on a very tight sugar-to-oxygen ratio. The moment sugar leaves 1.5 Brix corrected that signal gets muddy before any food even hits your stomach.
- The liver builds enzymes based on bad intel and ships them out half-built because temperature is wrong too hot or too cold depending on which direction sugar went wrong.
- The glands downstream receive care packages and instructions that don't match what was actually shipped.
- They're stuck doing 30% of work that was supposed to land on a 70% foundation and they don't have what they need to do it right.
- The body keeps trying but everything being put into the digestive tract is broken enzymes doing broken work long before any traditional digestive symptom ever shows up in how you feel after meals.
Sleep
This one's worth its own callout because it's so common people think it's normal when it's actually a clear signal something's off with their numbers.
- It only takes about half a degree of temperature shift to start swapping you from sleep hormones into wake hormones, since both are temperature-dependent. Sometimes there's an adrenal response layered on top of this too, since your adrenals respond to the warming alcohol your pancreas creates. So there can be more than one mechanism firing at once, which is part of why this can feel different from person to person.
- Here's the part that trips people up: if you test right after waking from one of these episodes, your number often reads normal or even high, not low. That's not because it wasn't low. It's because your body already compensated for the drop by the time you woke up and checked. The high reading you're seeing is the compensation, not the absence of a problem. The low is what woke you up in the first place.
- This is also why a continuous glucose monitor can look completely normal through one of these episodes and still miss what's actually happening. Continuous glucose monitors measure interstitial fluid, and your brain responds to the sugar to oxygen ratio with more sensitivity than that measurement can catch. Your blood sugar can stay within a normal-looking range the whole time even though your brain has already registered a shortage and told your body to act on it.
- What changes isn't necessarily the amount of fuel available. It's how smoothly your body is running on it. Your brain senses the ratio shifting and tells your body to burn more to keep things steady, which means you're pulling from storage and metabolizing more heavily even though the readily available fuel looks fine on a monitor. That extra burning is what creates the heat. So the CGM can show your fuel supply held steady while completely missing the extra work your body did behind the scenes to keep it that way.
A note on hot flashes and change of life
This connects to something a lot of people experience around change of life and hot flashes too. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Often the hot flash itself is being driven by this same sugar mechanism, your body pulling from storage and creating that heat. But it can also work the other direction, where a hormonal shift triggers first and that in turn affects how your sugars are behaving. Either way, managing your sugar numbers gives your body a greater capacity to manage its hormones, so it's worth addressing regardless of which one started it.
What to Do When Sugar Is High
If your corrected reading sits above 5.49 Brix your body is converting excess sugar into alcohol internally. That alcohol is doing two things you don't want: forcing calcium out of solution and precipitating it into liver tissue over time, and thickening your blood enough that red blood cells start sticking together instead of gliding through capillaries cleanly.
Water comes first
Before you change anything else, get your water right. The standard maintenance amount is at least 40% of your body weight in ounces per day. If you're drinking 40% of your body weight in ounces and your salts are still too high and your sugars are still too high, increase it. Bump it up by 10 ounces every three days until your salt number comes down to normal. If you reach 60% of your body weight in ounces before the salt comes down, stop there and don't increase further.
How you spread the water matters as much as how much you drink. Salts respond much better when water is spread out across the day generally 20 separate increments, roughly every 30 minutes for 10 hours. Your body absorbs it better that way than if you drink large amounts at once.
Cut the obvious sources while the body catches up
As your water is dialed in, it's a good idea to avoid foods that quickly turn into sugar while your body gets better at processing them. You can go back to occasionally using these foods later.
- White potatoes turn to carbohydrate very rapidly once they hit your system.
- Wheat products.
- Pasta.
- White flour products.
- No fruits or fruit juices after 2 PM. Your body's ability to process sugar drops as the day goes on A piece of fruit or a glass of juice at breakfast might be fine. The same fruit or juice at dinner will sit on your numbers overnight and push them higher by morning.
The principle here: foods aren't generally bad for what they are they're bad for what they aren't. Processed foods are a problem because they're lacking in minerals. Sugar cane had a lot of minerals in it when it was Sugar cane, but processing strips it down to a syrup that actually costs your body minerals to deal with. You end up with a loss instead of a gain.
Reintroduce complex carbohydrates first
When your body is processing sugars better and you've done the things that help it work better, the first thing to bring back is whole grains and other complex carbohydrates not white flour and refined products. Once your body starts to heal, those shouldn't be a regular problem anymore. The goal is for your body to handle more complex foods closer to the way they were created, and eventually a greater variety of them.
Support the body's processing capacity
Over the years I've watched people change their diets and try all kinds of things. The ones who make the biggest difference are the ones who remember that God created herbs and they were originally part of our diet. They're foods mankind forgot about because they don't taste good, but used consistently alongside everything else, they're part of changing a diet for real.
Before jumping to more extreme measures, herbs give the body the specific nutrients it needs to support the mechanisms that manage how sugars are processed. Everything else, water, avoiding processed foods, green drinks, helps move things through. Herbs are what give those mechanisms the raw materials to actually work better.
Sugar Detox
This formula carries a combination of foods that support the body's natural processing of sugars: Bilberry leaf, Cinnamon powder, Dandelion root powder, Nopal Cactus leaf, Oregon Grape Root powder, Yarrow flower powder, Diatomaceous Earth, and Goldenseal root powder.
You can shake it on your food and use it as part of your meal, though most people don't love the taste that way. Taking it in capsules is generally the easier route. Either way, four capsules with each meal is the general guideline to support your body's ability to process and utilize sugars.
This ties back to the point about herbs being foods mankind forgot, since a lot of them don't taste good on their own. That's likely part of why they fell out of regular use, even though the body still benefits from them.
Green drinks
Fresh green drinks from wheat grass or barley green work better than canned or bottled chlorophyll for most people. If you don't have access to fresh, dried forms like Green Magma, Blue-green manna or Barley Green powder are acceptable substitutes.
The chlorophyll in these drinks converts more easily into hemoglobin than other food materials, which means it raises your blood's oxygen-carrying capacity faster when sugar has been starving it.
How to make a fresh green drink: Take a fresh handful of wheat grass or barley green, wash it thoroughly, and run it through a blender with enough water to make it drinkable usually about 8 ounces of water per serving is a workable starting point. Strain and Drink it fresh, ideally on an empty stomach or away from meals so the sugars you're trying to bring down aren't competing with food digestion. Start with one serving per day and see how your body responds before increasing.
How to use Green Magma, Blue-green manna or Barley Green powder: Mix the powder with water according to the directions on the container. Same timing as the fresh version empty stomach or away from meals works best.
A note on comfrey: Comfrey was traditionally used in this protocol. The originator of this work found comfrey worked best for him to bring sugars into the right range, and it's included here for historical accuracy to show how this approach was originally developed. However, the FDA has determined comfrey is not safe for internal use. You can get good results from the wheat grass, barley green, and blue-green manna options above without the comfrey question. Those are what we recommend today.
Lactobacillus Salivarius.
This probiotic strain improves digestion of fats carbohydrates and proteins all at once. It takes pressure off your pancreas so it doesn't have to work as hard producing insulin against a rising sugar load.
What to Do When Sugar Is Low
If your corrected reading sits below 1.2 Brix, your pancreas isn't making enough warming alcohol to keep core temperature up. That temperature drop impairs every digestive enzyme you've got because they're all temperature-sensitive. Even a tenth of a degree drop is enough to slow enzyme function across the board.
Tools you can use when sugars dip
When sugars are dipping, you need something that helps bring them up or helps stabilize them until your next meal. These are tools you can use, together or separately, depending on what your body responds to.
Glandular Energy
This formula carries a combination of foods mankind forgot about that have a tendency to stimulate the glands that create energy and bring sugars into a more positive range: Licorice root powder, Kelp powder, Chamomile powder, Eleuthero root powder, Diatomaceous Earth, Garlic powder, and Thyme powder.
Take it in capsules between meals when sugars are dipping. Generally three capsules between each meal: once between breakfast and lunch, once between lunch and dinner, and once right before bed as you're lying down to go to sleep.
Those windows line up with when sugars tend to dip most. Mid-morning because your morning fuel runs out before lunch catches up. Mid-afternoon because that's when most people hit their lowest point around 2 PM. Right before sleep because your body hits its lowest point overnight too, which is why people wake at 2 AM unable to fall back asleep. If you're using it to help with that, take it right before bed, not after you wake up in the night. By the time you're awake, that dip has already happened, so taking it then won't do what it's meant to do.
If you feel a dip coming on at another point in the day, take three more then.
Sweetener in water
Putting a small amount of sweetener in your water can help keep things up between meals. About a tablespoon of brown sugar, molasses, or maple syrup for your whole day's water, not per glass. So if you're drinking 100 ounces that day, one tablespoon goes into that full amount, not into every cup you pour. Honey isn't generally recommended here since some people's pancreas responds differently to it.
Why not just eat more often
Eating small meals throughout the day seems like an obvious fix, but it keeps your body constantly digesting instead of giving it breaks between meals. Your body needs that time between meals to actually finish processing what it's already digested. Skipping those breaks tends to work against you rather than for you.
Shift toward complex foods
Eating less refined food and more complex carbohydrates helps sugars come up and hold steadier once they get there. That said, some people will still see dips even while eating well, and that's normal. It doesn't mean the approach isn't working.
Check your urine and saliva pH
If your urine and saliva pH are running high, your sugars can swing more sharply in response to everything else going on. Bringing both down toward the right range often calms that volatility. This usually improves within a couple of days to a week, depending on how out of balance the body is to start with.
When nothing else restarts it
Sometimes the pancreas just won't restart making its own warming alcohol, no matter what you eat, how much water you drink, or how consistent you are with Glandular Energy. If you've given it real time and the number still won't move, add about half a teaspoon of gin to your whole day's water, the same way you'd add sweetener, not into every glass, just into the full amount you're drinking that day. This can help kick that production back on when the body isn't restarting it on its own.
What to Do When Sugar Is in the Misery Zone
This is the one that ties everything together.
If your corrected reading sits between 2.0 and 5.49 Brix, you're in what we call the Misery Zone.
It looks high on paper. It feels low in your body. And it doesn't sit still, it swings between the two.
The reason this zone feels so unstable: oxygen and sugar move together in a ratio, and in this zone that ratio can swing in either direction. Sometimes your brain is getting too much oxygen relative to sugar, sometimes too little, and the same swing happens with sugar itself. Your brain is extremely sensitive to shifts in that ratio, so even small swings register as real symptoms. That volatility is exactly why this range earned the name Misery Zone. You're not dealing with one steady imbalance, you're dealing with a ratio that won't sit still, which means you get symptoms from both directions at once. You're not running one protocol here, you're running a combination of both.
Why this zone needs both tools
Because you're swinging between high and low rather than sitting steady in one direction, the extreme low tools don't apply here. You wouldn't use something like gin to restart alcohol production the way you might for a true low reading, since pushing further in that direction while you're also swinging high can make things worse rather than better. Instead, this zone calls for a combination of the milder tools from both sides.
Sugar Detox before meals
Use Sugar Detox before meals the way you would if you were sitting in the high range. This gives your body support heading into the meal, before the swing has a chance to climb.
Glandular Energy between meals
Use Glandular Energy between meals the way you would if you were sitting in the low range. This helps catch the dips that happen as your number swings back down.
Using both together makes sense here because you're getting pulled in both directions throughout the day. One tool alone only addresses half of what's actually happening.
Green drinks
Green drinks still help in this zone too. Wheat grass, barley green, or blue-green manna all do the same job here that they do on the low side: they raise your blood's oxygen-carrying capacity so oxygen that's already present actually reaches your cells instead of sitting in your bloodstream unused.
Watch for sudden drops during the day
The Misery Zone pings back and forth between elevated spikes and drastic crashes. You can be sitting at 4.0 corrected at noon and crash below 1.0 by 2 PM without warning. Keep something available to stabilize quickly when you feel a drop coming on.
Insomnia at night hits harder in this zone
If you're waking at 2 AM unable to fall back asleep while sitting in the Misery Zone, that's almost always a sudden overnight drop from elevated into low territory while you're not eating anything new to stabilize it.
Test consistently.
Apply the salt correction every time.
Pick the protocol that matches your actual zone rather than guessing based on how you feel (because how you feel is unreliable especially in the misery zone).
Give it time to work.
If you want help walking through your own numbers or figuring out which protocol fits where you're sitting right now, that's exactly what I do with clients every week.
You can book a session here
We'll go through all five numbers together and build a plan that matches what your body's actually telling us rather than what some generic article online says you should do.
Hi, I Am Scott James
C.H C.H.S C.N.H.P
I'm a trained herbalist and naturopathic dedicated to sharing everything I've learned through my education and years of real-world experience. This blog is my space to dispense the knowledge I've gained not just from my naturopathic education, but from decades of hands-on study and apprenticeship with my dad, who began working with clients in 1980. Since I was 12 years old in 2001, natural health and healing has been my main course of study—both through homeschooling and professional practice. I've been working with my own clients since 2016, and this blog reflects the culmination of my formal training, professional expertise, and the generational wisdom passed down through my family's commitment to natural health.
